The past year has been a transitional period for local bookstores. New ones have opened, including Raleigh's So & So Books, a 300-square-foot space shared with architecture firm In Situ Studio, and used bookstore Letters in Durham. Meanwhile, 30-year Raleigh mainstay Quail Ridge Books & Music saw the retirement of founding owner Nancy Olson. Quail Ridge just finished its first year under new owner Lisa Poole, a member of the Waste Industries-founding Poole family.

Poole, who had never run a business before, says that if she could have done something differently, she would have taken financial courses early in her run. She praises the store's longtime staff for helping things continue to run smoothly. "The back room is always humming with activity, day and night, but the customers never see that—it's like the wizard behind the curtain," she says. "Everybody who works out front also works back here with another duty."

Part of that duty is community outreach. For Quail Ridge and other local bookstores, public events and partnerships with local universities are major parts of building consumer awareness and attracting customers. "Having grown up here, staying part of the community is everyday life, not a marketing strategy," Poole says. Either way, it's crucial in the Internet age.

"It continues to be a challenge just to get people to walk in the door," says Tom Campbell, co-owner of The Regulator Bookshop in Durham. "You need to be doing events, promoting them in ways that you didn't have to 10 years ago, like Facebook and Twitter."

A major part of his outreach is a reading series that brings many national authors as well as local ones, drawing people in to the "handpicked, curated selection of books" that he thinks represents "the heart of an independent bookstore."

"The challenge for independents is to let people know that it's an experience that can't be duplicated on a computer screen," Campbell says. "And none of your money stays here if you buy something on Amazon—it's like you put all that money on a plane out of RDU. It's gone."

Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill, which opened its doors in November 2009, has done "better this year than any year we have been open," according to marketing manager Linnie Greene. The store has an expanded section for book signings that doubles as a site for off-campus UNC lectures and gatherings. "You have to make yourself a community center," Greene says.

So & So books has adopted a strategy similar to many New York booksellers by sharing space with another company, which allows them to keep a more limited selection with an emphasis on poetry, including local poets and small-press books.

"We can't afford quantity, so we go for quality," co-owner Charles Wilkes says. He used to manage two satellite branches of Borders at RDU, and he admits that while he's "still figuring things out" with So & So, it's a thrill to not have to stack books based on corporate mandates.

"We just got a shipment in and I'm so excited," he says, "because I know I'm going to love every book out of the box, you know?"

Courtesy of Quail Ridge

Happy readers at Quail Ridge Books

READINGS & TALKS: NINE TO SEE

INDY bookworm Zack Smith picks his must-see readings for this fall.

ERIC SCHLOSSER (NCSU Hunt Library, Sept. 9)—Presented in tandem with Quail Ridge Books, the author of Fast Food Nation, discusses his new book Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident and the Illusion of Safety, an in-depth look at the management of America's nuclear arsenal.

BOOKS & BEER: PAUL FRIEDRICH AND NEIL HINSON (Fearrington's The Roost, Sept. 11)—Local authors and local brews meet at this new weekly event, curated by McIntyre's Fine Books, which kicks off with cartoonist Paul Friedrich of Onion Head Monster and Man v. Liver fame.

DAVID HURST THOMAS (UNC, Sept. 18)—The Curator of Anthropology at New York's American Museum of Natural History undermines a romantic view of American Franciscan and Jesuit missions, drawing on new archaeological evidence, in the illustrated talk Romance and Reality in the Deep South's Mythical Mission Past.

FIONA RITCHIE (Motorco, Oct. 1; The Barn at Fearrington, Oct. 2; Flyleaf Books, Oct. 3; Quail Ridge Books, Oct. 4)—Fiona Ritchie, host of NPR's The Thistle & Shamrock, and Doug Orr, founder of the Swannanoa Gathering music workshop, chronicle the history and musical traditions of Scots-Irish immigrants to Appalachia in Wayfaring Strangers, a new book and CD from UNC Press. Ritchie's in-person events feature live music from the book.

RICHARD BLANCO (NCSU'S Hunt Library, Oct. 21)—In another Quail Ridge coproduction, the inaugural poet of President Obama's second term discusses his memoir The Prince of los Cocuyos: A Miami Childhood, which explores his childhood and the identity crisis he faced as a gay, artistic son of Cuban immigrants.

WILLIAM GIBSON (Regulator, Nov. 7)—In retrospect, the father of cyberpunk (see 1984's seminal Neuromancer) is looking more and more like a documentarian of the future (but with more ninjas). Gibson is touring his latest book, The Peripheral.

HAL CROWTHER (Regulator, Nov. 9)—The former INDY columnist is publishing An Infuriating American: The Incendiary Arts of H.L. Mencken, a book about the "Sage of Baltimore" and journalist's journalist.

CHRIS VAN ALLSBURG (Quail Ridge Books, Nov. 11)—Celebrate the holidays with the multiple award-winning author of The Polar Express, Jumanji and other beloved, occasionally traumatic picture books, who is promoting his latest, The Misadventures of Sweetie Pie.

RICK BRAGG (Quail Ridge Books, Dec. 11)—The Pulitzer-winning journalist probes the life of one of music's most influential and controversial musicians in Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story.